Imitation as Human Capacity
Imitation is a focus of research in many disciplines: in experimentally oriented fields including comparative, cognitive, developmental, evolutionary and social psychology; cognitive neuroscience; ethology; primatology; and robotics. In the more traditional human sciences, from Aristotle to Erich Auerbach, imitation, or mimesis, has been treated as a topic in ontology, philosophy, and aesthetics. Imitation has been recognized as fundamental in interaction as a modality for the linking of phenomenal experience and shared meaning in a way that creates a platform for more conventional, systematic, and symbolic expression-content linkages and kinds of interaction (Zlatev 2005).
Whatever the phylogenetic distribution of the innate bases of imitation, higher primate observational and experimental data suggest that these are “open programs” requiring substantial environmental input before there develops a significant imitative capacity. Imitative behavior is seen not as definitive of the difference between humans and other animals but as a modality that, strictly defined, is not easily or fully attributed to even higher animals, despite the fact that some of our common imagery of imitative behavior is based on ideas of it as animal-like, simian in particular. With such experimental and primatological evidence there is no contradiction between seeing imitative capacity as phylogenetically (though not uniquely) human and seeing it as strongly susceptible to long-term contextual (cultural) influence.
Relatedly, imitation is seen by many of these experts as a possible key to understanding empathy. While there is still much debate around the extent to which babies and higher primates imitate, or merely emulate, outputs,2 there is good evidence for the ubiquity of unconscious imitation or mimicry in human interaction. This phenomenon, dubbed the chameleon effect, refers to the unconscious or subliminal tendency to mimic the postures, mannerisms, and facial expressions of one’s interaction partners. This level of imitation often seems to be “under the radar,” or relatively unavailable to reflection.
Measures of electromyographic (EMG) activity show that people rapidly and unconsciously imitate the facial expressions of others, even when the presentation of these faces is not consciously perceived (Chartrand and Bargh 1999). Social psychological studies show that the mere perception of another’s behavior seems to increase the likelihood of engaging in that behavior, facilitating interactions and increasing liking between interaction partners. High scorers on empathy tests are more likely to exhibit the chameleon effect. Unconscious mimicry could lead to an empathic response by biasing the facial motor system, which has been shown to influence mood. Contributing to the picture of the role of unconscious imitation are well-attested imitation deficits associated with autism, hypothetically related to early inattention to social stimuli (including adults imitating the autistic infant) and deficits in joint attention reducing the frequency of synchronous movement (Williams et al. 2001). Together, these results suggest that perception, socially relevant imitation (even if unconscious or only liminally perceived), emotional experience, and empathy are highly integrated. Integration of imitation and affect is relevant to evidence of mutual attention to emotional states from the early colonial encounter material.
However, much of what is recorded as imitative behavior in early Australian encounter, as we shall see, is at a different level than any chameleon effect, more “on the radar”: in most events recorded (usually indigenous) people are described as engaging in imitation in which one person’s action—typically complex in a sensorimotor sense and sometimes experimental, that is, seemingly intended to elicit reaction—is directly imitated, and this imitation is apprehended by the imitated person as such. Imitation is to this extent shared, entailing an exchange of perspectives between those in the imitative action: model action, interlocutor imitation, model apprehension of the imitation and the intent to imitate. The imitation remains pre- or only loosely conventional, experiential, and often evidently emotion-laden but unschematized, perhaps in some instances not completely voluntary, but in many others clearly so; cross-modal (involving sensorimotor coordination), highly iconic of the “original,” and seemingly not oriented to making any particular statement or representation, but simply analogical. More examples of early journal recordings of such imitative behavior follow below.
Anthropologists on Imitation
The work of psychologists on imitation (e.g., Piaget and Inhelder 1969; Donald 1991; Zlatev 2005) has tended to focus on issues of bodily and cognitive capacity, on the question of human distinctiveness or otherwise in capacity to imitate, on the implications of imitation for definition of self and other, on spatiotemporal variations (immediacy, deferral) in imitation, on its proto-conventional and nonrepresentational character, on its relation to consciousness, on the capacity to imitate, on the relationality that imitation presupposes, as necessary to other aspects of human communication and interaction. Anthropologists, on the other hand, have tended to focus on imitation as a modality of relating to and defining oneself in relation to others at relatively high levels of social categorization of relationship between self and other. Recent explorations of this kind have therefore, not surprisingly, tended to come from consideration of the highly asymmetrical relations of colonialism.
In Mimesis and Alterity, Michael Taussig (1993) not only rejects primitivizing views of imitation that see it as animal-like; his focus on the fundamentally social, relational, and power-bearing enabled his critique of a colonial politics of representation of the other as completely different and separate. He argued that imitation is a useful trope for getting at processes of producing alterity, the mutually involved differentiation of self and other. Taussig (1993:19) epitomizes the “ability to mime … [as] the capacity to Other.” He cites Walter Benjamin’s remark that the “mimetic faculty” is the rudiment of a former compulsion of persons to “become and behave like something else” (Benjamin 1982). Taussig retains from Benjamin the insight that mimetic practice appears in every form of life, but also his conviction that it is diminished in modernity.
Taussig’s commitment to this idea is rooted in romantic yearning. He aims to “reinstate in and against the myth of Enlightenment, with its universal, context-free reason, not merely the resistance of the concrete particular to abstraction, but what [he deems] crucial to thought that moves and moves us—namely, its sensuousness, its mimeticity’ (Taussig 1993:2). Related to this is his concern to challenge capitalist reification, to restore tactility in order to understand how the world may be comprehended through the body. Little islands of imitativeness, sensuousness and tactility make themselves manifest everywhere, even if adults among us discover this by entering into what we imagine to be the child’s world (Taussig 1993:77).
While Taussig follows a Benjaminian line grounded in the idea of sensuous correspondence between something and that which repeats it mimetically, Derrideans contest the kind of totalization that would allow for there to be an original to copy. They value continuing deferral and argue that anything that seeks that kind of totalization produces a radical and disruptive concealment and some form of excess. Performative repetition and inherent instability are the conditions of always-partial identity.
Homi Bhabha belongs to this Derridean camp in the way that he has made widely cited use of the notion of not mimesis broadly speaking but mimicry—his focus is on the artifice of imitation and the asymmetry that underlies it. A key textual provocation for him is British politician and essayist Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous “Minute on Indian education” (1835) in which he had written of creating “a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (Bhabha 1994:87).
Bhabha’s point is that mimicry produces people who are anglicized but emphatically not English, meant to be “almost the same, but not quite. This gives rise to what he calls the “ambivalence of mimicry … which fixes the colonial subject as a ‘partial’ presence” but ensures that there is a strategic limitation that makes mimicry “at once resemblance and menace” (86). Bhabha considers mimicry not a harmonization but a resemblance that is not presence. This does not seem to directly deny the original as presence in the way